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“Analog” presentation tips #1: Use a flipchart [Video to watch]

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In this short series of posts, you’ll get many neat tips from expert presenters on using “analog” techniques – that is, without electronics – to help you reach those key goals of connecting, standing out and being remembered.

In this post, Brendon Burchard (founder of expertsacademy.com) presents using a flipchart instead of slideware like PowerPoint or Keynote. As you’ll see, he speaks to camera rather than presenting live, but his approach is actually well-suited to a small in-person audience (also known as a boardroom-style presentation). In fact, if you were to set up a camcorder and then project the video feed on a big screen, you could even use a flipchart with a large audience too.

Although this video’s almost an hour long, when you’ve time I highly recommend you watch it all. If you’re short of time right now though, you might want to skip through parts of the clip. For instance, Brendon’s use of the flipchart starts at 5’50”. (Link)

As well as using a flipchart, Brendon uses several other techniques to intrigue you and me as we watch, so we stay glued to what he’s saying. Listed below are the powerful presentation techniques I spotted, with links to more details about them:

Use a tempting title
Brendon has packed the title with words that convey the value of his talk, like the ones in bold here: “essentials for a multi-million-dollar expert empire”.

Right in the title, he says he’ll give us 10 key points

Enumerate your points
Right in the title, he says he’ll give us 10 key points, and he’s also numbered each yellow sticky note so we stay on track during his talk.

Use an acronym (or other word pattern)
He tends to use pairs of letters (like C1 and C2), but the effect is the same as an acronym – intriguing us about what the letters stand for and making his content easier to remember.

Show cues before content
Before his talk, he put underlines, circles and sticky notes on the paper, which intrigue us about what they represent.

Over to you

I hope you find Brendon to be a very engaging, enlightening, and encouraging speaker, as I did. Can you spot any other “tricks” he uses to focus your attention on him and his message? If so, please mention them in the comments box at the bottom of this post. (To return here after clicking that link, just click your browser’s Back button.)

Whether you use slideware like PowerPoint, or a flipchart, why not try using some of the techniques listed above in your next talk? Good luck, and let me know how you go, below…

Bonus YouTube tip

By the way, this and a couple of my other posts use a YouTube tip that you might find useful, so I thought I’d draw your attention to it…

You can create a link to a particular moment in a YouTube video. (For instance, this post uses a link to 5’50” in Brendon’s video, above.) To do that, you can play the video yourself, pause it at the moment you want, right-click on it and choose Copy video URL at current time, as shown here:

That’s particularly handy with long clips, but even with shorter ones, it lets you point out a specific piece of content rather than always sending people to the start of the video. So the point you’re trying to show with the video will come across much more clearly, and your audience will thank you for it.

For instance, if you’d like to see this tip in action, check out this critique of Allan Pease’s TEDx talk on body language. In each of the sections discussing the talk, you’ll find a link that takes you straight to the exact second in the video. So, you can see precisely what the text is referring to.